This is a question I got from one of my readers sometime ago. It was actually made as a comment to one of my articles, but I have decided to give the answer as a blog post so that I can answer it exhaustively as I know a lot of my readers will be interested in it.

Firstly, since ClickBank is not the only Affiliate center where you can find products to promote and make money, I will give an expanded answer to “how you can pick a good affiliate product to market”.

I understand the huge interest people have about promoting ClickBank’s products. Many of the products on ClickBank give great percentage commission as high as 70%. But if you are in a country that is not listed in ClickBank to be able to participate in their program, you can do the following:

Get resale rights

If the product you wish to promote has a resale right, you can purchase it and sell it. The good thing about this is that you can use the product, sell it, and keep all the profit.

Go to other affiliate centers

You can look for the same or similar products to the one you desire to promote at other affiliate centers that allow your country. Commission junction, Amazon, Paydotcom, max bounty, and linkshare are other alternatives that accept participants from almost all countries, including Nigeria.

Now to the above question: How Can One Pick A Good Product To Market From Affiliate Centers?

Affiliate centers have statistics that tag the products on their sites according to their sales record.

At ClickBank (that’s if you can use ClickBank), they have what is called “Gravity”.

The amount of Gravity of a product, which is a number assigned to it represents the number of people promoting it that have sold at least one copy. With this number, you will have an idea of how popular the product is.

A product with high gravity suggests it is a good selling product.

At Commission Junction, we have statistics like Earning Per Click (EPC), and Network Earnings to give you an idea of how much the product is selling. A product with high EPC and Network Earnings also suggest it is a good sellable products – if people are already selling it, you too!

At Amazon, you could actually search for top selling products in any product category and get a list of the top selling products in order of their sales.

Generally, you have statistics about the performance of products, such as the ones above, including their Conversion Rate, to gauge the selling potential of any product.

But, I must be quick to say that you shouldn’t base your choice of product to promote solely on its high sellable statistics that you got from the affiliate centers.

The reason is that if the product is top selling, the chance that competition would have built up so strong is there. For instance, if a lot of people are promoting it using PPC, the level of bidding for its keywords would have gone up, beyond what you can afford to compete favorable.

Those that started promoting it newly and have made lots of money from it can afford to bid very highly for its keyword, and therefore get more traffic to their sites, and of course make more sales and more money. If you are just coming in you may find yourself caught in a fierce competition, and you may not have the money to face them eyeball-to-eyeball, shoulder-to-shoulder.

This is how many new comers to the PPC game lose money. They find a top-selling product at an affiliate center, and off they go to set up PPC campaign, without much understanding of how PPC works.

Before long they would discover they are either not having clicks or there are clicks on their adwords, but the clicks are not converting, that is, people who are clicking on the adverts are not going ahead to make order for the product. Therefore, while they are paying Google (if they are using Google Adword), they are not making any commission because they are not selling. That, of course, is a loss.

The simple reason for getting into this position is that the amount of money the marketer is biding on the high converting keywords (these are keywords that people that are more likely to make purchase use) is not enough to get his or her adwords exposed to people who may likely buy.

In a nutshell, the marketer’s adwords are only seen by people who are either looking for information or just “window-shopping”. They will click on the adverts without any intention to buy.

It is therefore not a good strategy to pick a product to promote just because it is a top selling product on ClickBank, CJ, or other centers. Most of the time, if not in all cases, products that have been identified as top selling at the affiliate centers are usually very competitive to sell.

Even if you decide to use search engine traffic to sell it, you may discover a tough competition there too, so much that unless you know search engine optimization and are able to optimize your site strongly, your site may never come near the first page on the search engines.

Experienced marketers, who have money to spend, would have secured the services of search engine optimization experts to strongly optimize their sites to a high page rank, so that whenever anyone makes a search for their keywords, their sites would be on the first page. They would have also made their sites highly professional with the ability to convert strongly.

The consequence of this is that it will be extremely difficult for you to displace these sites from their top positions on the search engines. If you want to try, you should be prepared to know deep search engine optimization strategies to apply on your site, and you should be willing to put in some months of work to build it to the level it could compete favorably with the old sites.

The better way to choose a profitable product to sell is to research an industry and find a niche that has good search volume as well as high potential to make purchase. You should also check the level of competition in the niche, and if it’s not high, you could be sure of making money in it. You could then go to any of the affiliate centers to find a product that solves an identifiable problem in that niche to promote.

And the good thing is that there are lots of profitable niches that have not been exploited yet. All you have to do is to find them.

Researching profitable niches and promoting suitable affiliate products as a monetization method on blogs, is part of what we offer at Blogging For Millions Classroom. You can still join the classroom today and put your quest to make money blogging on the Right Track. But you really have to hurry to sign up because it may be closing any time from now as we have just two slots remaining.

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